The Two “Fatal Flaws Lurking in American Leftist Politics”

A humble attempt to help Jordan Peterson with his challenge

[Author's Addendum, June 9, 2018 — Please note:This not an anti-left or pro-right article. Society needs both a right and left wing for a healthy balance. This article is for the benefit of everyone, regardless of political orientation. The ideas presented here, though simple, are not widely known, but should be.]

Dear Prof. Peterson:

I have had the pleasure of following you prior to your meteoric rise to fame, and I applaud your courageous battle to free society from the excesses of political correctness. This is my humble attempt to help you in your mission.

Before continuing, readers need to be aware that you are not anti-left. Like Yin and Yang, both left and right are needed for a healthy, free, progressive society. The serious problems result from the extremes. Your battle against the radical left is not because it is inherently more dangerous than the radical right, but because unlike the right, which has pushed claims of racial superiority beyond the pale of acceptability, the left has yet to take any corresponding stand. But because the social sciences have become almost entirely dominated by the left, potentially harmful radical left policies are being advanced with little or no resistance.

Where is the catastrophe?

Despite your phenomenal popularity in recent months, there is a stumbling block preventing your doomsday warnings from being taken more seriously by the public. It’s that people wonder: Where is the catastrophe?

You regularly refer to the scores of millions killed by the tyrannical ideological regimes of the 20th century — Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China. You warn that it can happen again, here. But where is the evidence? All the leftists are doing is advancing the well-being of non-heterosexuals and other “oppressed” groups. What’s the big deal? Where are the death squads? Who is being hurt?

It is important, therefore, to open the public’s eyes to the tangible harm of political correctness. Citing that we can be fired for criticizing it may not be enough. As long as we tow the party line, our jobs will be safe. People are willing to pay a premium for safety. So you’ll need to show where the blood is. Perhaps I’ll help you see it.

Your proposed boundary

Prof. Peterson, you propose that the proper taboo for the left should be equality of outcome based on group identity, rather than equality of opportunity, which is a laudable goal.

This is, indeed, a worthwhile boundary to fight for. Yet it may be too limited. If equality of outcome becomes taboo, you may discover other boundaries the left should not be crossing.

I posit that there is a more basic “fatal flaw of the left” — actually, two fatal flaws. There are two lines the left has crossed. Each crossing is harmful, but the combination is catastrophic. These flaws should be so obvious that even leftists should accept them once lights are pointed on them.

Fatal Flaw One: Erasing the line between objective and subjective harm

There are two basic categories of negative acts: 1) those that cause objective harm, and 2) those that cause subjective harm. Of course, an act can cause a combination of both, but it’s important to recognize the distinction.

Objective harm is the result of an act that, if you do it to me and I get hurt, you are the one who hurt me. Obvious examples are theft, assault, arson, rape, and murder. Less obvious examples are denying me civil rights, such as the vote, equal public education, opportunity for employment, freedom of movement, and access to residence and health care.

Subjective harm is the result of an act that, if you do it to me and I get hurt, I am the one who hurt me. These are acts that hurt my feelings, or that I find offensive. The classic example is an insult. If you insult me, and I feel upset, I really upset myself.

Most of the acts that cause subjective harm are verbal. My attitude towards what you say to me determines how much pain it will cause me.

However, there are words that can cause objective harm. Examples are yelling fire in a crowded theater, slander and libel (which can destroy people’s careers and social life), and incitement to violence.

The acts that are universally considered crimes by all civilized societies are the ones that cause objective harm. The proper job of a government is to protect its population from objective harm and to punish those who inflict it. A government cannot protect people from subjective harm, because our feelings are not in its control. And when a government does treat acts of subjective harm as crimes, it makes everything worse. It increases both subjective harm and objective harm.

Imagine what life would be like if I call the police on you whenever you hurt my feelings. Would you admit guilt? No! You will vehemently defend yourself from the charges and try to blame me. Would you like me better? You will hate me, and will probably look for an opportunity to do something worse to get revenge against me. You will also hate the judge and the government for being so unfair to you. Your anti-social feelings will grow.

But this is precisely what the left has done. It has erased the boundary between objective and subjective harm. It treats offending people like it's the ultimate act of evil. It has declared the traditional slogan, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me,” to be a lie, and replaced its conclusion with, “but words can scar me forever/can kill me.” The revised slogan teaches that insulting me should cause me more pain and damage than breaking my arm.

The social sciences have become dominated by left-wing ideology. That's why some psychologists are using neuroscience to justify the erasure of the boundary between objective and subjective harm. They point to the fact that when we feel offended, brain cells are activated. This thereby “proves” that the harm is objective, and that the utterers of the offensive words are as guilty of hurting us as if they hit us with a baseball bat. These psychologists ignore the fact that all feelings have corresponding brain activity, but that the pain generated by words is a result of the way our mind processes them. Wittingly or unwittingly, these psychologists reject the basic premises of therapy and wisdom.

The nature of the civil rights movement

The left sees its political activism as a fluid continuation of the civil rights movement of the previous century.

But it’s not.

The civil rights movement was not about combatting subjective harm. It was about objective harm, sanctioned and even perpetrated by no less than the government itself, with laws that discriminated against minorities, including women but especially Blacks. Thankfully, the Civil Rights Movement has successfully led to the elimination of discriminatory laws.

With some possible exceptions, such as rights for gays to marry, the social activists of today are fighting for laws against subjective harm. They want the government to guarantee that people will not feel offended by anyone. The attempt to achieve an impossible goal is bound to cause more harm than good.

Fatal Flaw Two: Replacing might makes right with might makes wrong

In the lawless world of nature, might makes right. You can kill me, and no one arrests you.

Civilization cannot function by might makes right, or we would suffer from unrelenting tyranny and bloodshed. The most basic feature of a civilized society is a legal justice system. It replaces might makes right with justice makes right. We take our grievances to a court of law, which applies principles of justice to determine guilt and punishment.

The Old Testament/Jewish Bible forbids judges from engaging in favoritism. They are to favor neither the rich/powerful person nor the poor/weak person. Sometimes the rich/strong person is the wrong one, and sometimes the weak/poor person is the wrong one.

Our natural tendency when witnessing a struggle is to side with the apparent underdog. As Wilt Chamberlain said, "Nobody roots for Goliath." Siding with the underdog is great in entertainment, but readily leads to evil when it becomes a policy in real life. Weakness makes right is just as arbitrary and amoral as might makes right. It makes it impossible to objectively judge between right and wrong. It results in unjust punishment in instances when the top dog is actually in the right, and it facilitates the unethical use of weakness to manipulate the system.

And herein lies the second fatal flaw of the left. It has replaced might makes right not with justice makes right, but with might makes wrong/weakness makes right.

Policies can only work if they operate in accordance with the laws of nature. Weakness makes right turns the entire natural order on its head. Feeling pleasure in power is useful not only for survival in nature, but in civilization as well, as it drives us to strive for success rather than failure. In today’s new order, we're expected to feel guilty about our natural instinct for power and to see weakness and victimhood as virtues rather than stations in life to avoid. Imagine what would happen to sports if the way to win a game is to lose. Well, the same thing would happen in real life.

The nature and harm of political correctness

The combination of these two flaws constitutes the essence of political correctness: The ultimate wrong is to offend the feelings of people with a status of weakness.

But people will legitimately ask, where is the harm? Where is the bloodshed?

Prof. Peterson, you think the situation is bad in higher education. But it’s much worse in lower education, because college students engage in bullying much less than younger kids, and are much less likely to turn to the school authorities for help with their social problems than are their younger counterparts.

I expect you may not be aware of it, but the anti-bullying psychology, created by left-thinking university psychology professors, is the ultimate in political correctness, turning every one of us into a potential bully or victim or, to use your preferred language, oppressor or oppressed.

Thanks to the successful political activism of the anti-bullying field, schools are now required to function as totalitarian police establishments responsible for children’s interpersonal relationships 24/7. School staff need to do double duty as security guards, detectives, and judges, treating any complaint of subjective harm as a serious crime needing thorough investigation, interrogation, adjudication, reporting, and punishing. Rather than eliminating bullying, these laws have led to a growing epidemic of bullying and intensified hostilities among students, parents, teachers, and administrators. Today is the most stressful time in history to be a school administrator, as they can face lawsuits for failing to accomplish the impossible. (Research has shown that the most highly regarded anti-bullying programs barely cause a dent in the problem, yet schools are supposed to know how to stop all children from being bullied.) Just today, the news reported that a Pennsylvania court awarded a student $500,000 dollars, because the school district could not stop fellow students from ridiculing her “gender-nonconformist presentation” — in all three schools she attended! Half a million dollars! American dollars, not Canadian! For a mere $500, I could have taught the girl how to stop being bullied, but now we, the taxpayers, have to fork out half-a-million bucks because schools can’t force all children to respect nonconformist gender presentation. In actuality, the schools’ attempts to stop the bullying made the bullying escalate.

Almost all school shootings are committed by victims of bullying. These kids are consumed with anger, hatred, and desire for revenge. Anti-bullying policies were intended to reduce the frequency of these horrific massacres. Instead, mass shootings happen with tragic and increased frequency. Should this surprise us? Ever since preschool, students have been taught to think of anyone who upsets them as an evil bully who deserves to be hated and eliminated from society. Even adults have taken to blaming bullies as justification for committing murder.

Have you seen the German film, The Lives of Others, about life under the East German totalitarian police state? The underlying political theme is the high rate of suicide resulting from government surveillance of citizens' social lives.

Many children who take their own lives do so because they can no longer tolerate being bullied. Anti-bullying policies are intended to prevent suicides by victims of bullying. Instead, the suicide rate has skyrocketed among kids — tripling among girls — during the same period that schools have been officially combatting bullying. Why? For two reasons.

What happens when kids are taught that words can scar them forever or kill them? They become more upset when they are insulted, which unwittingly fuels the bullying, so they get insulted even more.

Second, schools have been informing children that they must tell the school authorities when they are bullied. What happens when kids get the school authorities to investigate the bullying complaint? Hostilities immediately escalate, as each side and their parents try to convince the school that they are right and the other is wrong, and the informer becomes known as a snitch, which can be a social death sentence. If the child is lucky, the school authorities will succeed in making the bullying stop. But too often, the bullying spirals out of control, even leading to serious violence. The victim of the bullying, feeling betrayed by the school’s false promise to make the bullying stop, may eventually despair and decide to put a permanent end to their suffering (and occasionally, to the suffering of schoolmates and teachers).

Promoting truth

Prof. Peterson, you are a great advocate of truth; truth sets us free.

There are two simple, basic truths that the left — and the rest of us, too — need to recognize:

1. Subjective harm is different from objective harm.

2. Weakness does not make right.

We need to call to order anyone who denies either of these truths, just as we would denounce anyone who would argue for racial superiority.

I enjoyed your post and agree with many of the points you make. I would however like to point out the harm that is being done and the lived destroyed by the ideology of the left. It's pretty simple : the War on Poverty and the policies enacted during the LBJ era (and their progeny) are total failures and the Left it too invested in them to try new policies. Look at the education systems and the social conditions in Baltimore, Chicago and Detroit. Generation after generation of wasted potential, not to mention the appalling war zone like murder rates. Compare poverty rates before and after the programs went into effect and look at the amount spent without any significant result. Our resources are not unlimited and the money spent must actually help people, not be thrown away. The fact that no one is willing to challenge the status quo on the Left is telling and is causing real harm. The elected officials in these areas are more interested in leading protests for the latest cause de jure than in confronting the multigenerational despair that exists in their districts. This is a direct result of the Left's elevation of virtue signaling over actual virtue. How many kids have to die before the Left has the courage to admit that its policies have failed its people?

it’s unbelievable to me that Psy Today would publish this guy in the first place; the sharp dualistic distinction he’s making between “objective harm” and “subjective harm” is seriously scary and seems very outdated to me, philosophically for sure, and psychologically too I would imagine…. The author makes a big deal about emphasizing how hurting someone’s feelings with words is not the same as some type of objective, physical bodily injury that may be inflicted upon someone. I didn’t look this guy up and don’t know what his training is, but he is definitely implying that psychological harm is not physical and therefore not as harmful; according to Kalman, if we’re “subjectively harmed” we’ve ultimately harmed ourselves, the insult (or whatever) from the other person had nothing to do with it. This seems terribly specious and actually very disingenuous, dangerous and just plain dumb. Reading Kalman go on about “subjective harm” and “objective harm” I couldn’t think of a better example of what Charles Taylor (quoted above) terms a “buffered self.” Kalman obviously views physical bodies as containers for consciousness which does allow one to distinguish what is “me” from the “world out there”; what is “inner” is mine and what is “outer” is just unmediated stuff we encounter. Simple! Lol! If only it were true. When we talk about the human nervous system in the context of symbiotic relationships with our ecosystem, it doesn’t make sense to imagine the human nervous system and mind as enclosed within the skull; the human nervous system is more ecological than we would like to admit. We’re co-continuous with our environments and there is no clear distinction between mind and body. Thoughts, feelings, emotions are real things (not secondary illusions) that have causal efficacy. No one would argue that physically murdering someone is the same as insulting someone and hurting their feelings, but the difference here is a difference of degree not kind. Insulting someone, being verbally, emotionally and psychologically abusive, is harmful and traumatic and is emphatically wrong. It is my guess that Mr. Kalman behaves differently around different people, e.g. I bet he would bite his tongue around young children and not use the foul expletives he might use around his buddies at the golf club. Is he being politically correct when he censors himself like this? Of course not, he's recognizing difference, recognizing power hierarchies and being lovingly sensitive to others.

Additionally, the whole “might makes wrong” thing, omg… Kalman is a biblical scholar too! At one point Kalman cites the Jewish Bible, claiming it forbids judges to engage in favoritism which supports his claim that “Sometimes the rich/strong person is the wrong one, and sometimes the weak/poor person is the wrong one.” He interestingly leaves out the little bit about how in the Judeo-Christian Bible preference is definitely given to the well-being of the poor and powerless of society in the teachings and commands of God as well as the prophets and other righteous people. A rich and powerful person may be legally right about something but the question of weather or not a legal system itself is right or wrong does not enter Kalman’s thought process. How unfortunately parochial and short-sighted of him.

I certainly agree with the author that moving from the objective (associated test.. What would a "reasonable person" think about whether the subject was harmed) to the subjective (associated test... Subject claiming harm assesses personal feelings and determines harm) has made a less than productive contribution to determining what constitutes a legitimate concern in the public sphere.

The problem with subjective harm is that it's so ... subjective. For example, there is much about your comment that offends me and leads me to fear harm for myself and my children. Will I one day meet someone like you who dislikes my viewpoint and reports me as a bully and tries to get me fired from my job? I've known people who were accused of being a "bully" because they had the wrong politics. I was once accused of being a racist because I supported a tighter immigration system (btw, I am Canadian, not American so don't judge me by your policies). Then the person who said that learned I was a former refugee and a visible minority. Only then were they able to hear my concerns about having an effective, functional system. But if I had not been a visible minority and a refugee, the other person would not have wanted to allow me to speak, and if they had a means to force me to silence, they would have used it.

Too often these days, people are using "anti-bullying" and social justice as a means to silence the views of those they don't like. But it is crucially important to hear the views of those you don't like. That is how you learn and grow and combat the human tendency to confirmation bias.

Yes, there are lines that should not be crossed -- harassment, hate speech, threats of violence and intimidation and the like are already dealt with by law. Gradually, legal tools are being developed to deal with Internet harassment. Yes, we must educate for a more civil society where people are treated with respect and express their disagreement with respect. But we must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Free speech is the foundation of democracy, and the very essence of free speech is the right to express viewpoints that are different (i.e., extremely offensive) to the mainstream.

My family comes from a totalitarian regime. The most heinous crimes against humanity are inevitably presaged by the abandonment of the ideals of free speech and the suppression of offensive speech.

The US Equal Opportunity Employment Commission does include as harassment creating an environment the average person would consider intimidating, hostile, and abusive. Most types of even verbal school bullying, if it happened in the work place, seem to qualify for this definition. While there are laws against racial, orientation, sexual, age, etc. harassment - the lack of a general antiharassment law is a huge loophole bullies exploit. Even corporations are addressing this kind of behavior, even if slowly (Australia, Sweden, certain Canadian provinces are FAR ahead of the US). If we adults don't put up with this in the workplace, why should our kids put up with it at school - especially when not getting the message across early makes it more difficult to address the bullying problem, regardless of age.

Kalman and his defenders vastly underestimate how severely hurtful humiliation itself can be - often much worse than many ordinary physical pains. Given the choice between a severe humiliation and the worst physical pain of my life (busted open finger, scalding radiator water on my arm), I'd definitely take physical pain.

As bad as physical pain can be, at least - unlike bullying, especially widespread persistent bullying - there is no widespread attitude of that says "YOU deserve to be of lower social rank simply because you experienced that act" - as opposed to deliberately setting out to commit a clearly wrongful act out of willful indifference to how the perpetrator feels about it.

The diminished social standing can severely impact your quality of life and overall productivity and potential in the long run, even if it's not obvious at first. Loss of standing motivates others to deny you access to their informal information channel (read: "grapevines" helping hands, etc. that make less difficult your ability to perform tasks, achieve goals, and all-around make your day-to-day business of living easier.

This can severely impact on a person's psychological ability to not only live up to their potential, but even feel the basics of confidence around others.

The Rousseauist assumption that humans are basically good but made corrupt by society. Freud and Judeochristianity maintain man is essentially selfish or evil and made good and generous by society.

I just read the Nature article about the horrific Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck, which was basically World War Zero ten thousand years ago. At that time, tribalism and murder were so common there was one man for every seventeen women.

I don't know how any rational human being can assume that we are born good coming from that violent primate background. I understand the need to believe that, but it's destructive naivete.

Another (3rd or 4th or 5th depending on whether you include Professor Petersons and Dr. OBrien)...
The left seems to require that society "celebrate" deviations from what was once thought to be the norm rather than simply "tolerate" those deviations. This has led to all sorts of "special days" and "special weeks" and in the context of a society intent on cultural relativism perhaps underlies a growing trend to challenge existing cultural markers. It is possible that the need to "celebrate" rather than simply "tolerate" leads to policy/legal initiatives that include such elements as "compelled speech" (this is what Dr. Peterson originally rebelled against) and all manner of inclusivity initiatives).

Don't be too hard on me here.... this is just a notion at this point and I am open to alternative interpretation.

Less obvious examples are denying me civil rights, such as the vote, equal public education, opportunity for employment, freedom of movement, and access to residence and health care.

Before we divide harm into objective and subjective pieces, we need to separate "harm" from "not harm." Failing to help someone is not the same as harming them. Not the same. Not close. Not the same ball park. Not even the same sport.

If you choose to offer me a job, or a house or heath care, or a bus ride that's either out of the goodness of your heart - or if I've paid you to do so. Payment aside, you have no obligation and I have no right. If you prefer not to help me, I may be worse off than if your preference was to help me. But you haven't harmed me. To confuse absence of help as harm is a far more basic flaw in one's moral structure than any confusion between objective and subjective harm.

Dr. Kalman, I draw your attention to The Heterodoxy Academy if you are unaware of it. This is a growing group of academics committed to viewpoint diversity in campuses. I won't include the link but it's easy enough to find by Googling. There are voices speaking up, I just pray they will not be drowned out.

I have no political affiliations, my voting history has been all over the map and I frequently find myself within the swing vote. Both "the Left" and "the Right" have been guilty of heinous crimes in human history. Power corrupts. The first marker of someone who will abuse their power when they get it is their inability to tolerate viewpoints that are diffferent from their own and their willingness to use oppressive means to silence the other person.

Yes, I have known of Heterodox Academy pretty much since its beginning, and am on their mailing list. I have mentioned it glowingly several times in my articles. The problem for me is that they only accept professors into their membership and I don't qualify. They say that they occasionally will accept writings from people who don't fit their membership criteria. I sent them something I thought should be of interest but got no response. Perhaps I should be more persistent.

I can see the author's intention behind including an addendum but I think the attempt to disclaim that the article is not pro-right is a failure. Using an article to draw criticism on any select group of people is taking liberty to cause "subjective harm" and thus devalue the group in question. If you want respect from your readers, don't be an academic bully. There is too much division in the world already. Instead of wasting time distinguishing categories of harm, it would be more productive to heal harm and move forward without any contention. Reading this article was a total waste of time. It is completely one-sided.

When I was in 6th grade, I was part of a group incident that involved targeting a girl’s weight and repeatedly referring to her as a fat piggy. My friends and I were publicly reprimanded by our teacher for it; In 10th grade, I still had the bad habit of calling things “gay” and after saying it a couple of times, my favorite teacher stopped me to ask why I did that and tell me it was actually pretty tacky of me to say gay as if it’s a bad thing.

The Left fervently believes that might makes right. Their attempts to shut out Conservatives from public life shows that they lean towards totalitarian politics. Victimhood is the justification for their aggression.

Like it was cited in this article that anti-bullying efforts create more bullying... President Trump's success shows that the Right reacts much the same way to leftwing bullying. Years of weak leaders such who shied away from fighting back such as Bush, Romney and McCain have given way to MAGA.

Years of BLM incitement led to the Charleston Church massacre and the death of Confederate statue protester, Heather Heyer. This is despite decades of improving race relations that have are being reversed by victimhood. And many of these so called victims are actually anti-white racists.

The hypocrisy of leftwing activism is that it seeks to oppress it's opponents because it views them as oppressors. That is what is meant when they say "by any means necessary" and "No justice, no peace".

Give me a break. The idea that "the left" invented the idea of sins in thought or word being equivalent to sins in deed is absurd. You can turn subjective harm into a bipartisan issue quite easily by calling this kind of un-accountable thinking what it is - religion.

Alex, you are absolutely right. The left did not invent this. It has been around for many thousands of years, and it has been a basic element of many religions. However, in the modern world at this time, it is being promoted most fervently by the left, not based on religious beliefs, but on a secular, supposedly scientific approach to life.

Both at the beginning and the end of the article I state that the flaws I am talking about in the article need to be recognized by all of us, not just the left, as very few people are cognizant of them. I can understand, though, that my mild qualifying statements did not make enough of an impact on the mind of the reader.

What is today considered "bullying" since time immemorial performs a critical function. Back in the day, big kids picked on the little kids, until the little kids grew, then they picked on the littler kids. The teachers and adults picked on the kids, and the principal picked on everybody. There was a paddle in his office. There were some people you just didn't pick on if you had any sense. It was a way of establishing social "pecking order," and it was a great socialization tool that toughened you up and prepared you for the working world, and especially for functioning within a stratified military or corporate culture, when you grew up. There was a taboo against "tattling," which was bothering a teacher, adult, or authority figure with minutiae you should be working out for yourself. That was a surefire way to compel your peers to hate you and ostracize you; not only that, but the authority figure whose time you wasted with your petty bickering was just as likely to give you a swat. No one likes a tattle-tale. So with few exceptions, we learned to fight our own battles, take our medicine, avoid or gang up on those who would hurt us, and devise other ways to cope with social adversity. We learned that not everyone would, or even should, like us. You certainly can't force anyone to like you by rule or any other means. We learned that some people were going to insult us and that the amount of credence we gave them controlled the impact of the insult. We considered the source. Most of the time we were "damned by tinkers," that is, insulted by people who were not of much value, so who cares what they think anyway. We would have been mortified and embarrassed to go to whining to some authority about it. That was unthinkable. It would just make us pathetic in the eyes of everyone. You toughened up and either took it if you had to (abusive bosses were the norm) or fought back if you could without negative blow-back. There was some self-respect, after all.

I would just like to add a point. I agree that leaving people to their own devices to figure out how to deal with bullying, as they have done from time immemorial, is superior to the modern approach that overprotects children and unwittingly intensifies the bullying problem. But not everyone will figure out on their own how to successfully navigate bullying. Many people will still suffer needlessly because they won't all figure it out. That's why my approach is to teach people, beginning from childhood, the dynamics of bullying and how to deal with it on their own. It is much easier to learn how to become resilient to bullying than it is to learn how to read or do math.